“For I'll keep my humanity, though I did not keep my promises. ... and Love shall not be wrested from my veins.”

“love is what we are about, my darling," she says. "Not even in death has our love faded, for I live in your veins.”

“She bore an uncanny resemblance to my mother, but the same beauty bloomed differently in each of them. My mother's fairness was exquisite and untouchable, roaming alone in an abandoned castle. Khalto Bahiyas' beauty took you in immediately. Hers was easy and disclosed hordes of laughter stolen from wherever it could be found. Gravity, sun, and time has scrawled on their faces the travails of hard work, childbirth, and destitution.”

“The soldiers in my life had raised the bar for bad guys.”

“Death, in its certainty, is exacting its due respect and repose before it takes my hand.”

“Amal,I believe that most Americans do not love as we do. It is not for any inherent deficiency or superiority in them. They live in the safe, shallow, parts that rarely push human emotions into the depths where we dwell.”

“Under the broken promises of superpowers and under the worlds indifference to spilled Arab blood.”